A former CIA counterintelligence expert who claimed to be the first person to call the coronavirus a hoax has died — after testing positive for COVID-19 and denying it is real until the very end, according to a report and his pal.
Robert David Steele, a QAnon devotee who was touring the US “to awaken the nation in truth,” blogged about his doomed battle with the contagion Aug. 17.
“I will not take the vaccination, though I did test positive for whatever they’re calling ‘COVID’ today,” he wrote alongside an image that appeared to show him hooked up to a ventilator
“The bottom line is that my lungs are not functioning,” he wrote, admitting even then that it had been a “near-death experience.
“We will never be the same because now we know that we’ve all been lied to about everything,” added Steele, who calls himself a former spy and Marine.
His friend Mark Tassi revealed the death of the “great patriot” in an Instagram post Sunday — calling it “very suspicious” that Steele died from this “typical respiratory thing,” refusing to say the word COVID.
“Was it an attack?” Tassi asked in a more than 14-minute video in which he said his friend’s tour had been “attracting a lot of attention” from a “vile faction that will go to any length to stop that movement.
“Robert has died, and the whole thing is very suspicious,” Tassi said. “Wake up! There’s many more of us than them … so stand up, and fight!”
As well as being a prominent COVID-denier, Steele was reviled for being a known “antisemitic conspiracist,” according to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.
Steele’s death was reported by Vice News, who interviewed him for a documentary on QAnon, which he called “the single greatest information operation in the history of humanity.”
“When we interviewed him … he refused to wear a mask and claimed he was the first person to call covid a hoax,” tweeted Jack Bryan, who wrote the Vice doc, “Qanon: The Search for Q.”
“So folks wear a mask and get vaccinated, crazy won’t protect you,” Bryan wrote, blaming Steele for unnecessary deaths from having “led the charge on anti vaccine/covid denialism.”